Hydropolitics in Africa

To enhance last week’s post on transboundary water resources, this entry will briefly discuss shared sub-surface resources. The video below introduces groundwater in Africa and highlights the associated opportunities and challenges: Groundwater accounts for >80% of sub-Saharan Africa’s domestic rural water supply ( Calow et al. 2010 ).  Yet, people are not always aware of its transboundary nature (fig.1) as, unlike rivers, aquifers cannot be seen.  Thus, groundwater consumers may also be unaware of who else uses the aquifer or the impacts their use/contamination has elsewhere. So, whilst there is less explicit conflict over groundwater ( Kulkarni and Aslekar 2018 ), there is perhaps more potential for political disputes. Moreover, with climate change leading to higher evaporative losses of surface waters ( Serdeczny et al. 2017 ) but increasing groundwater recharge due to fewer but heavier rainfall events ( Owor et al. 2009 ), groundwater is likely to become an increasin...

The construction of the Grand Ethiopian Renaissance Dam (GERD), Africa’s largest dam, has been fraught with problems including corruption scandals ( Ljubas 2019 ), death of the chief engineer ( Champion and Manek 2019 ) and military threats ( Walsh and Sengupta 2020 ). Additionally, it was recently reported that GERD negotiations have reached another stalemate, after Egypt, Ethiopia and Sudan failed to agree on a procedure to complete talks ( Abdallatif 2020 ).  Whilst in the last post we explored how water provision is influenced by politics at a national scale, GERD demonstrates international scale African hydropolitics. This post will explore how the Nile, a transboundary water resource, has led to political tensions between countries. It provides an insight into key factors affecting the latest GERD disputes and some background to help you follow future updates. The Nile  The Nile basin covers 3.3million km 2 , spanning 11 countries (fig. 1). The two main tributaries of th...

Around mid-2017 friends and family in Cape Town started talking about their fears of running out of water. By the end of the year my social media feeds were full of shared posts about water conservation. On the 1st of February 2018, the South African government increased Cape Town’s mandatory water restrictions, limiting water use to 50 litres/person/day ( City of Cape Town 2018 ). Recommendations accompanying the restriction included only one toilet flush a day and one laundry load a week ( CBC 2018 ). Additional water had to be bought (if you were lucky enough to find some) or collected from natural springs in the city (fig. 1). All of this was in an effort to avoid “Day Zero” – the day the city runs out of water. This post will explore whether this crisis was caused by poor environmental conditions or politics.  Figure 1. Messages from my friend at the University of Cape Town who was experiencing the drought first hand. So, who or what caused this crisis? Drought? Well let’s pr...